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"As eloquently stated in The Rensselaer Plan 2024, the university's strategic plan that leads us to our 200th in 2024, "the most significant transformation at Rensselaer over the past decade has been the creation of a research portfolio of a size, significance, quality, and prominence that positions us to impact Global Challenges." Indeed, over the past 12 years, Rensselaer has solidified its place among the important technological universities of the 21st century..." more

Research in Media, Arts, Science, and Technology facilitates new approaches to networking, advanced visualization, sensor design, haptics, and multiscale modeling and simulation, which are supported by the core capabilities of EMPAC.

Enabled by the capabilities of the CCI, Rensselaer has developed important programs in Computational Science and Engineering focused on high performance computing, big data, and data analytics, which supports research and innovation across a broad front.

Our excellence in Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials builds from the fundamental understanding—experimental, theoretical, and computational - of the underlying atomic and molecular properties of a wide range of nanostructured materials. We now are developing robust, affordable, and sustainable methods for manufacturing new functional hybrid materials, and the hierarchical systems and products based upon them.

In the News

Researchers have pried open some information on how Asian clams move around Lake George.

At the December Lake George Park Commission meeting, the Darrin Fresh Water Institute’s Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer and Jeremy Farrell reported findings from their research on the aquatic invasive species first spotted by Farrell in August 2010 off Lake Avenue Beach in the village.

... in Bolton Landing, Rick Relyea sat in comfortable new conference room at RPI's Darrin Freshwater Institute, using a massive video screen to demonstrate what is called the "data visualization laboratory."

Here is where lake, stream and weather data drawn from a network of up to 40 sensors, once crunched in massive computers, will be turned into graphic displays to explain how the 32-mile lake behaves and how it might change if some troubling trends continue. Surface sensors are connected to the lab via cellphone signal.

The NY Cap Research Alliance is one of 93 projects in the Albany region receiving a share of $60 million through a state funding competition. The alliance won $500,000 last week to create a capital investment program for biomedical researchers at area colleges and health care organizations.

Francine Berman, a professor in the computer science department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was elected a AAAS Fellow "for distinguished contributions to the field of computer science and community leadership in data cyber-infrastructure, digital data preservation, and high performance computing." A former chair of the AAAS section representing Information, Computing, and Communication, Berman was delighted to learn that she has been elected a AAAS Fellow.

“Individuals can go into a hospital and end up even more sick than when they enter,” said Colleen Costello, a young biomedical engineer, who realized the magnitude of this problem when her grandmother contracted MRSA during a hospital stay. Her company, Vital Vio, is trying to tackle the issue by creating bacteria-killing lights.

"Generally the rules are as light as they can keep them," said Jim Hendler, a computer science professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York ... The site's "random" board gets the most notoriety, but it's just a "small part of a much larger entity," Hendler said. "Despite the infamy, it really does some positive things. It creates community," he said, adding that 4chan remains very much user-focused in the most basic sense of the term. The site "wanted to stay most true to the notion that you could be anonymous, you could talk about whatever you wanted, that you could control the conversation."

The project aims to instrument New York’s Lake George with five vertical profilers, 12 tributary stream monitors, eight acoustic Doppler current profilers and 11 weather stations by 2015. Organizers say the effort will make it the world’s “smartest lake.”

“IBM, as part of their Smarter Planet effort to use cutting-edge tech, is using Lake George as a proving ground for their sensors,” said Rick Relyea, scientific lead of the Jefferson Project at RPI. “So we do have sensors from YSI (deployed), but on top of that, IBM uses its own computer boards to make them smarter.”

Lake George is waiting, her future in question. For the first time in the history of the 32-mile-long lake – a gift from long-ago glaciers that once covered the land, then melted – our actions may have imperiled her health.

A more than decade long, multi-million dollar partnership formed to ensure the long-term health of Lake George is already making progress, barely a year after getting started. Matt Hunter has a closer look at the Jefferson Project.

Jim Hendler, professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, has taught a course on Turing. He called Turing's work in the 1940s "stunning." "He revolutionized cryptography, the modern field of computer science, [and] the subfield of artificial intelligence," Hendler said. "A lot of the math with those things goes right back to Turing."

RPI has robots designed for industrial use. Whalen approached experts there with a question: Could they help me in some way? Thus was born an idea inching closer to reality: converting a fixed industrial robot one would find in a factory into an affordable, mobile, in-home aide for the elderly and others, including those with paralysis of multiple limbs. The result was on display Monday in the Low Center for Industrial Innovations on the RPI campus.

RPI faculty and students are working to build a cost-effective robotic caregiver. Robotic caregivers can offer assistance to the elderly and physically disabled individuals, but many cost $400,000 and are not affordable. But now faculty and students at RPI are hoping to make them less expensive. The team has started down a path of industrial assembly line designed robotics. They believe they have found the answer in Jamster: a dual-arm mobile assistive robot.

Robots can do all sorts of things. They work on assembly lines helping build cars and also on high tech jobs. “The robots stay away from humans or humans stay away from robots because robots can hurt humans.

RPI students are getting involved as well. "We're building projects to help people. Other research I've done, it stayed in the lab, so it's amazing to me that I can take people's feedback and then use my technical expertise to design and help people and it's just a really satisfying line of work,” RPI senior Andrew Cunningham said.

Individuals who've suffered spinal cord injuries and older people who aren't as mobile as they once were are among those who one day might benefit from the work being done by a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Professors John Wen and